History shows how Catalan culture has overcome critical situations far more adverse than the present. The Catalan language has not been replaced and this anthology contains four Catalans, one Valencian and one Mallorcan, who, although they lived through the tail end of the dictatorship, grew up under a democratic regime. Together, their work could not be more modern, comprehensive or polyphonic: politics and history cohabit with love (both heterosexual and homoerotic), learned allusion and popular image, stanzaic rigour and freedom of form, the song to the land of one's birth and hymn to the voyage.

Featuring the work of six of Catalonia's leading poets - Josep Lluís Aguiló, Elies Barberà, Manuel Forcano, Gemma Gorga, Jordi Julià, Carles Torner - translated by a prize-winning translator, and with an introductory essay which sets the poets within a wider literary context.

The Catalan poet, Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) is a poet of personal experience - he once suggested that his poetry had an affinity with Hardy's, a poet he greatly admired - and succeeds like no other poet in capturing the feeling of Catalan society both during and since the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).